Capturing life's verities

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Robert Drew is a filmmaker who doesn't mind revisiting the past.
The 80-year-old documentary pioneer has led a rich life full of
accomplishment, but he is more than happy that his name remains
associated with a pair of groundbreaking documentaries:
Primary (1960) and Crisis: Behind A Presidential
Commitment (1963). Both helped create cinema verite and
captured on 16mm film one of the key political figures of the 20th
century, John F. Kennedy.

In Primary and Crisis you can feel the march
of history in the grainy footage, which is what Drew envisaged in
1960, when he decided there was a story to be told in the campaign
being waged in the Wisconsin Democratic Primary. It was a political
battle between two senators with their eye on the White House:
Hubert Humphrey, the favourite, and the young John Kennedy.

"When I first approached Kennedy about making Primary,"
Drew says, "I told him it would be a new form of reporting, a new
form of history."

Drew proved true to his word. From the first scene - Kennedy
moving through a crowd clamouring to touch him, the camera right
behind him, moving with the swaying rhythm of the crush - Primary
proves to be remarkably prescient both in the way it was filmed and
what was actually shot. It adopts the fly-on-the-wall approach that
is so common now that it's a favoured tool of satire, but which was
virtually unknown at the time; what's more, with several camera
crews dogging both candidates for five days straight, you witness a
fascinating generational shift - there's more than a whiff of pop
hysteria to the surging Kennedy campaign.

Drew had been shaping up to play a part as an archivist of the
American century for much of his life. He was born in Toledo in
1924, and was a WWII fighter pilot at the age of 19, serving in
Europe. Inspired by noted war correspondent Ernest Pyle, he joined
Life magazine after finishing his military service,
working as a reporter and editor. It was in the mid-1950s, while
covering a Chicago court case between the US government and General
Motors, that Drew foresaw the possibilities of shooting film on the
move.

"The photographer had his shot and we walked down the courthouse
steps and a television crew was standing there. The camera was on a
tripod - it was huge - and they had a crew of eight people," says
Drew. "They had to ask us, 'What happened in there?' I thought to
myself, 'Why don't you guys take the camera off the tripod, walk in
there and start shooting?' They couldn't, but I decided that
eventually I would."

It wasn't until 1959 that technology matched intent.
Primary and Crisis were shot by two-man teams
with portable cameras and mobile synchronised sound, although Drew
remains steadfast in crediting the philosophy above the innovation.
"It took years to get the equipment right," he says, "but it's not
just about moving the camera, it's getting the camera involved with
the characters in the story that's important."

Drew was summoned to screen his film for JFK and his wife,
Jackie, while they were on holiday. "John F. Kennedy had never seen
himself that way before and he enjoyed it. When it was over he
turned to me and said, 'What do you want to do next?' I told him I
wanted to make a film about a president having to make a decision
with his back to the wall. He agreed right there."

It took almost three years for Drew to get the go-ahead. As
events such as the Cuban missile crisis unfolded, Drew would call
White House press secretary Pierre Salinger, who would say no. Drew
realised that most international flashpoints would be off-limits to
him on the grounds of national security, but a domestic one was
another matter.

Crisis: Behind A Presidential Commitment was filmed
just six months before Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas. Playing
out like a political thriller, it follows the efforts of Kennedy
and his brother, attorney-general Robert Kennedy, to enforce a
court order that would allow black students to attend the
University of Alabama, despite objections of that state's governor,
George Wallace.

Drew weaves a narrative that relentlessly builds in tension as
troops are called out amid allusions to the American Civil War.
Drew, who respected Kennedy, could see the changes that had been
wrought by the burden of office. "He'd been bombarded by all the
problems of running the country and he'd made one huge error - the
Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba - that he'd had to admit to, but he'd
found a personal balance in relation to handling his power. The
young, ebullient optimist had turned into a well-tested
president."

By the time Crisis was finished, Drew's team had splintered.
D.A. Pennebaker (who covered Bob Dylan in 1966's Don't Look
Back) and Albert Maysles (who captured the Rolling Stones in
1970's Gimme Shelter) went on to help define rock-music
filming, while Drew's visual aesthetic would also inform the
coverage of the Vietnam War and ultimately influence broadcast
journalism.

Drew has just finished a new piece, From Two Men In A
War, which covers his experience in wartime Italy where he
spent several months hiding behind German lines after being shot
down. With his wife, Anne, as his long-time producer, Drew remains
dedicated to his art.

"We're still interested in what happens in the world," he says.
"We love documentaries and keep at them, as we have for all these
years. Thankfully, the technology keeps helping us as we get
older."